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I assure you that politicians very much do have the power to shut down departments, fire civil servants, etc. And if none of the options on your ballot paper are promising to do that, you can stand for election yourself.
The obstacle you face is not that the civil service is all-powerful. It's that your fellow citizens disagree with you.
https://www.civilservant.org.uk/information-dismissal.html
Politicians may not fire or hire civil servants in the UK. They may request for them to be moved, but they will get a new civil servant in a similar mould. They can rearrange departments but those departments will, again, be staffed by the Civil Service and I do not believe that the government can formally choose which civil servants are appointed.
These tools might be enough if the civil service contained a significant amount of different opinions, but in practice they are wholly insufficient. Given that the legal system also leans hard left, I can’t see any future for conservatism in the UK without completely reworking the Civil Service, the human rights apparatus, etc. What my fellow citizens think does not affect government policy, only government rhetoric.
The government makes the rules. If they want to fire civil servants, they can give themselves the power to do it.
In theory, yes. In practice, I can't recommend highly enough that you watch Yes, Minister. There was a post about it here not too long ago. It's utterly brilliant. You will laugh a lot. You will have a joyous time watching it. It will be the highlight of your year.
I'm a huge fan of Yes Minister and frequently refer to it as my favourite documentary. It's extremely true to life.
Nonetheless, the power of the civil service lies in manipulation and persuasion. It's not actual power. They thrive with governments that are directionless, cowardly, and unresolved - which is most of them. But when the voters clearly want something and the government is determined to give it to them, in the end the civil service must meekly say - Yes, Minister.
Brexit actually happened, after all, despite the many attempts to sabotage it.
I think you lost the thread of this conversation. We're talking about the civil service deciding to prosecute someone who they view as a major political opponent. They're trying to put their political opponent in a cage and strip his name off the ballot. If accomplished, that is actual power.
Not only was the British bureaucracy caught with their pants down on Brexit the way the American bureaucracy was caught in 2016 (they thought it was already so unlikely to go through with the regular measures that there was no need to pull out all the stops), but I find it unlikely that the British bureaucracy feared something like Brexit in the same way that the American bureaucracy feared being dominated by Trump/Trumpists.
Stewart Baker's great line about technology is that you never know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who designed it fear for their jobs. Trump was something like that, but somehow, maybe even worse. It's likely totally irrational fear, but most fear is irrational. That fear, and the knowledge that they got wrecked when they only implemented regular measures, was sufficient that they decided to roll the dice as many times as possible on as many questionable charges as they could come up with, knowing that they don't actually have total control of any one process and can't completely guarantee success in any one venue. They've had this power of prosecution in their back pocket for a long time. They've always kind of known it was there; it's the classic stuff of banana republics. They simply haven't tried smacking it down and asserting their hard power in quite such a fashion, maybe since Ted Stevens.
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Do you really, honestly think that could happen? Without the civil service pulling every dirty trick in the book? Without all sorts of scandals bubbling up out of the woodwork? Without strikes? Without rebellions in the Lords? Without legal challenges?
Regardless, if the necessary requirement to get conservative policies passed is ‘lead a rebellion to replace the existing bureaucracy’ then that sounds exactly like an oligarchy to me. The King technically has the power to overthrow the PM tomorrow but if there’s no realistic prospect of exerting that power then you don’t really have it. Same with the government. The set of powers it has in reality is far, far smaller than the ones it’s supposed to have.
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How would we confirm that unless we see it actually happen?
I disagree with your assertion, and point to the numerous and well-documented instances of the civil service and other centers of unaccountable power wielding massively disproportionate influence in ways I consider malign. Illegal Undercover ops to discredit elected officials and cripple their ability to govern are actually kind of a problem in a purported democracy. End-runs around the concept of a free press are likewise a problem for similar reasons.
But in the end, this comes down to opinions. you are arguing that the system is basically fine. Other people are arguing that it's broken. You can engage with their concerns, and perhaps persuade them, or trust the system and simply handwave them, in the hopes that their critiques are unfounded. The later is, obviously, the correct answer at least some of the time, for some claims. Time will tell if this is one of those times.
You mean like when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Civil Service Department?
Or if that's too far in the past, how about the Department for International Development, abolished in 2020.
I swear, some of you people want there to be a shadowy cabal in charge of everything.
Thanks for these examples, I didn’t see this reply before.
As far as I can see, the departments were abolished but the functions were reallocated. This would be enough to prevent a few civil servants from unduly influencing policy but I don’t think it’s enough to prevent a unified civil service from continuing their preferred policy. Note the continued presence of Stonewall in civil service departments despite the government explicitly forbidding it, or the way that ex-Tavistock personnel seem to be cropping up again in their new gender treatment facilities.
In evidence against myself, all government departments have now been dropped from Stonewall's list of morally upstanding employers. Various components of the NHS are still on there though, as are many quangos and all of the regional governments (NI, Scotland, Wales).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/18/stonewall-removes-government-departments-top-100-employers/ (paywalled)
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... Both of those examples are in the United Kingdom, and the DID was merged into the Foreign Office without many firings. The CSD reforms did cashier out 140k people from the civil service before breaking the department into new groups, and some functions were privatized, so I'll give you that one, but it was also almost forty years ago and lead to massive efforts to specifically try to prevent that exact sort of thing from ever happening again.
In theory, the UK doesn't really have a 'higher pleading' in the way the United States has the Constitution, so there's nothing explicitly preventing a future PM from changing the law and stripping a new department out. But in practice the last attempt for a significantly less robust rollback ended Poorly. Which isn't strong evidence -- there's a lot of failure in the Johnson government! And yet.
Yes, because @Corvos was specifically talking about the United Kingdom.
To your other points, I'm not disputing that a serious effort to gut the civil service would face stern opposition. My point is that if the voters want it to happen, it absolutely can happen.
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